Other Titles • Airplane! • Flying High (1980) • Kentucky Fried Airplane (1980) • Die Unglaubliche Reise in einem verrückten Flugzeug (1980)
Synopses for Airplane! (1980)
1.
A tongue-in-cheek spoof of the disaster genre.
A former wartime flight commander has to take control of a jet after every pilot aboard comes down with food poisoning -- even though he's now too scared to fly.
The airplane's passengers include a wild assortment of comic loonies.
(15 votes)
2.
The quintessential movie spoof that spawned an entire genre of parody films, the original Airplane! still holds up as one of the brightest comedic gems of the 1980s, not to mention of cinema itself (it often tops polls of the funniest movies ever made). The humour may be low and obvious at times, but the jokes keep coming at a rapid-fire clip and its targets--primarily the lesser lights of 1970s cinema, from disco films to star-studded disaster epics--are more than worthy for send-up. If you've seen even one of the overblown Airport movies then you know the plot: the crew of a filled-to-capacity jetliner is wiped out and it's up to a plucky stewardess and a shell-shocked fighter pilot to land the plane. Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty are the heroes who have a history that includes a meet-cute á la Saturday Night Fever, a surf scene right out of From Here to Eternity, a Peace Corps trip to Africa to teach the natives the benefits of Tupperware and basketball, a war-ravaged recovery room with a G.I. who thinks he's Ethel Merman (a hilarious cameo)--and those are just the flashbacks! The jokes gleefully skirt the boundaries of bad taste (pilot Peter Graves to a juvenile cockpit visitor: "Joey, have you ever seen a grown man naked?"), with the high (low?) point being Hagerty's intimate involvement with the blow-up automatic pilot doll, but they'll have you rolling on the floor. The film launched the careers of collaborators Jim Abrahams (Big Business), David Zucker (Ruthless People) and Jerry Zucker (Ghost), as well as revitalising such B-movie actors as Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Robert Stack and Leslie Nielsen, who built a second career on films like this. A vital part of any home film collection. --Mark Englehart, Amazon.com
(14 votes)
3.
The spoof comedy that set the gold standard for all that followed it, AIRPLANE takes shots at the slew of disaster movies that peppered cinemas in the 70s. When the passengers and crew of a jet are incapacitated due to food poisoning, a rogue pilot (who has a drinking problem and is afraid of flying) must cooperate with his ex-girlfriend turned stewardess to bring the plane to a safe landing. No disaster flick cliche is left unroasted, and the musical score itself takes a less than reverent look at overly melodramatic compositions.
(13 votes)
4.
"One of the top ten funniest movies ever made!" -American Film Institute
Voted "one of the 10 funniest movies ever made" by the American Film Institute, Airplane! is a masterpiece of off-the-wall comedy. Featuring Robert Hays as an ex-fighter pilot forced to take over the controls of an airliner when the flight crew succumbs to food poisoning; Julie Hagerty as his girlfriend/ stewardess/ co-pilot; and a cast of all-stars including Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Leslie Nielsen, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar…and more! Their hilarious high jinks spook airplane disaster flicks, religious zealots, television commercials, romantic love…the lists whirls by in rapid succession. And the story races from one moment of zany fun to the next!
(13 votes)
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